Thursday, September 24, 2009

Edmond H. Weiss

The trouble with fashionable words and phrases is that, like all fashions, they quickly become unfashionable. Used in speaking, they are harmless enough; as the fashions change we can adjust our vocabularies. But writing is persistent; manuals, reports, plans, and proposals can have an effective life of several years. Moreover, the documents in an organization's files tend to be copied and reused in later documents. A brief description of a project can reappear in an organization's proposals and plans for decades.

The second problem with fashionable language is that, as people become eager to use it, they are less precise about its meaning. For example, when everyone was interested in quality in the mid-1990s, the word was used so often in so many contexts that business scholars began publishing papers containing elaborate conceptual frameworks — just to explicate the numerous meanings of the term. The meaning became so imprecise and diffused that, to a large extent, any sentence containing quality could be interpreted in a half dozen ways, all defensible; in effect, it was no longer possible to do business research with quality as an understandable variable. In the past five years, globalization has begun to manifest the same pattern, meaning very different things to different supporters and opponents.

Business people are especially susceptible to management fads and the vocabularies associated with them. Management consultants often give new names to old constructs — structured analysis becomes reengineering, for example — creating the illusion of new knowledge. In messages for international readers, however, these fashionable expressions can be treacherous. Unless these terms are defined in a glossary, international documents should be free of buzzwords — overworked words, or any words uniquely associated with a particular management theory or popular management consultant. Among the hundreds of risky terms are • reengineer (or re-engineer) • quality, total quality • empowerment • prioritize • impact, impactful • downsize, self-actualization • globalization • synergy • enterprise solution • information architecture • knowledge management • downside, upside

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